Biography Essay

If Sir James M. Barrie had written no play other than Peter Pan (1904), the extraordinary and enduring popularity of this single work would testify to his talents as a dramatist. As it stands, however, the more than forty plays he wrote also manifest his creativity, albeit a creativity often marred by excessive sentimentality. Barrie's fifty-year career as a playwright exposed him to the whimsy of W. S. Gilbert, the problem plays of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, and the social comedy of Oscar Wilde. Indeed, his plays taken as a whole form a compendium of late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury dramatic and theatrical conventions—a virtue which paradoxically also makes his works seem dated.

James Matthew Barrie was the ninth of 10 children of David and Margaret Ogilvy Barrie, born on 9 May 1860 in Kirriemuir, Forfarshire, Scotland. Barrie's somewhat austere father seems not to have been nearly so important...